RideGiver
Role: User Researcher, Interaction Designer
Challenge
How might we encourage college students to give rides to others students?
Solution
A mobile app that allows college students to give rides within communities they belong to.
Research
“Possessing wealth and material goods doesn’t lead to happiness, giving them away actually does”
My secondary research strongly suggested that happiness could be a key motivator behind giving. However, I still had a few questions I needed answered:
When are students happy?
How do students interpret giving?
Where do students go?
To dive deeper, I experimented with cultural probes.
Cultural Probes
A select group of students were each given a carefully arranged package of activities to complete in the span of three days. They wrote a journal entry and sketch a picture for every moment they felt happy. They identified physical locations on a map where they felt most happy. They reflected on abstract images of giving and what giving meant to them. They also built a difficult origami, gifted it, and reflected about the experience such as the building effort and selecting the receiver.
Summary
The results showed that students felt happiest when engaging with a community and were most motivated to give to those in the community.
Translating the user insights into requirements, I concluded the following:
• Student finds or creates a community
• Student talks with a community member
• Student gives ride to a community member
• Student requests ride from the community
Design
I started sketching out various scenarios and potential screens.
After sketching a bit, I started wireframing
I then worked on the visual design and iterated through the flow as well
Outcome
My hope for this project was not only to explore ways students can share rides, but also a desire to encourage them to give more.
*This was a graduate school project. I passed.
